We all know the business advantages of adopting a Learning management system (LMS) to manage eLearning courses, create its content, deliver it to its audiences and monitor and review the performance of its students. The payoff for business from an effective LMS comes in the form of productivity gains, cost efficiencies, and a skilled workforce.
Next Generation Authoring Tools
If you are tired of spending your resources on an LMS that is tricky to install, complex and difficult to maintain, you should be looking the new generation of eLearning authoring tools. These tools foster employee collaboration as well as cutting costs.
Here are six business challenges eLearning authoring tools can help business overcome:
- Overcome Knowledge Shortage: As high skill workers retire, businesses are facing a brain drain and need ways to cascade best practice and high performers know how across the enterprise. eLearning authoring tools can support mentoring programs to share their expertise and experience in a format that is engaging, works across devices and connects with millennial audiences. This knowledge forms an important intellectual asset for the business.
- Accelerate Responsiveness: Whether it’s dealing with cyber-attacks, beating competitors to new markets, or needing to meet new regulations, speed matters. Emerging technologies are driving global changes in the way we shop, buy, sell, consume, compete.
- Using eLearning Authoring Tools To Overcome Business Challenges work and communicate together. Using an authoring tool, your internal experts can deliver detailed action plans to individual groups, quickly, wherever they are and on any device. If your knowledge is sitting on a cloud-based authoring tool, you can then update or add to the messaging in seconds as your response unfolds. Enhanced speed to market is a major benefit of authoring tools.
- Reduced Outsourcing Costs: Given the way modern businesses are interwoven with their supplier network, outsourcing at least part of the operation is at the heart of many business models, particularly if an area requires specialist knowledge or skills. By investing in a smart cloud-based authoring tool, you give yourself the options as to when to build in-house, and when to outsource. The added bonus is that your contractors can create content in the same tool.
- Nurture Employee Engagement: In-house collaboration is a proven path to productivity improvements, cost savings and lower employee turnover. Accenture, Forbes, Harvard Business Review and Deloitte all found highly collaborative organization outperform their peers and collaborative tools such as eLearning authoring tools are often playing a key role much of this success. According to Harvard Business Review, “Companies in leading sectors have workforces that are 13 times more digitally engaged than the rest of the economy.” Cloud-based, collaborative authoring and communication tools assist in making the spontaneous sharing that goes on in companies more efficient, and more global.
- Learn At The Point of Need: For a business, minimizing downtime and productivity loss is imperative in today’s competitive environment. Tools that facilitate training that is relevant, self-paced and usable on any device goes hand in hand with learning at the point of need; be it on the job at home or during a commute. With 70 percent of learners rating online learning as having a positive influence on job performance, facilitating modern multi-device on-the- fly learning is a no-brainer! This data was shared in a post published in Elucidat.
Key Learning
Bringing people together behind common goals, and empowering employees to make a difference both to their own development and that of others is a key driver of productivity, innovation, retention and long-term business growth. As Deloitte outlined in their Human Capital Trends 2016, “Despite the strong shift toward employee-centric learning, many learning and development organizations are still struggling with internally focused and outdated platforms and static learning approaches…Mobile, social, and web-based platforms that can deliver on-demand learning content are “must-have” capabilities.”
Quick Tip
Look for tools that not only empower employees to create learning content but open the doors to letting employees review and comment on the content created for them.
What To Look For In eLearning Authoring Tools
When evaluating an eLearning authoring tool, look for technology that can reduce costs by:
- Duplicating and re-using content across your team.
- Creating a digital asset library where you can re-use assets created by anyone, on any project.
- Translating iterations of a project without having to re-create projects from scratch, in different languages.
- Streamlining the review process using tools with built-in review and comments features.
- Save time intensive and complex communication chains by spanning production teams, inside and outside your organization.
- Direct editing, where you have internal experts make edits directly to the content via your shared tool.
What Learners Look For In eLearning Authoring Tools
Learners look for three key attributes in their learning tools:
- Relevance over quantity: Learners find or are served relevant, personalized and adaptive content fit for their performance needs, right then and there.
- Two-way conversations: You can seek feedback and comments on the content, conduct surveys, and polls on content.
- Multi-faceted design approaches: Use everything from one-page performance support resources and a simple video platform to micro-learning videos, social sharing, interactive challenges, games, and certified development journeys.
Conclusion
While selecting an eLearning authoring tool, ensure you incorporate live dashboards to demonstrate how learners are engaging with your content and answer social polls, questionnaires and challenges. Your tool kit should also display key trends such as location and devices used. Knowledge is power; without understanding how your content is being embraced, when and on what device, you can’t improve or keep up with the fast-paced changes in learner trends.
